Thanks to director Sean Baker, I had the opportunity to sit down with Taiwanese filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou at the Deauville Film Festival for my filmmaker appreciation podcast, Past Present Feature with Marcus Mizelle. The full conversation and other episodes can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.Tsou arrived at Deauville representing Left-Handed Girl, Taiwan’s official 2025 Oscar submission for Best International Feature, and now streaming globally on Netflix. The film marks her solo directorial debut after years collaborating with Sean Baker, the four-time Academy Award winner behind Anora, Tangerine, andThe Florida Project. Tsou and Baker co-directed their first feature, Take Out, a microbudget New York story shot on miniDV that quietly became a calling card for a new style of resourceful, grounded filmmaking.Fifteen years later, that same spirit of resilience and minimal-footprint creativity defines Left-Handed Girl, a film that was written in 2010 but only began production in 2022. Financing delays stretched the project across more than a decade, but Tsou now views the long wait as essential to the film’s evolution. “Everything has its timing,” she told me. “Every film has its own fate. You cannot force it.”The final film lives inside that belief. It is intimate, handmade, and emotionally direct, shot entirely on an iPhone 13 with Beastgrip accessories and shaped by a small crew navigating the realities of shooting in Taipei’s crowded, unpredictable night markets. What Tsou captured with those minimal tools is a reminder that mobile filmmaking is not simply convenient or novel. In the...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Wednesday, 24 December